how to make time
Today with a myriad of instruments we can explore things we never imagined. But we no longer see directly what is right in front of us.
— Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander1
I discover the “treasury of youth.”2 The “Treasury of Youth” [“El tesoro de la juventud”] seems to have been a kind of illustrated encyclopedia for children in Argentina during Cortázar’s youth. Here, in a tone that mimics the patronizing rhetoric of many such volumes, Cortázar enlightens his readers in the history of transportation technology.
The point of departure for this lesson is the observation that children seem to take innovations for granted, seldom pausing, for example, to consider the human ingenuity concentrated in a jet plane passing overhead. “Velocity, silence in the cabin, stability”: the jet achieves all of these. But the incessant human desire for improvement, the narrator intones, soon left jets behind. For engineers discovered, one after another, the helicopter, the steam engine and the steam ship, the sailing ship, the rowboat and the bicycle. Each of these trumps its predecessor in terms of safety and of the relative emphasis each places on the journey over the destination. Finally, human beings come up with walking and swimming as the absolute apex of transportation technology. As evidence, the narrator offers the observation that beaches, where one can see many people walking and swimming, appear to be the preferred gathering places for human beings, especially, he notes, in the era of paid vacations.
I like the subtle complexity and the innocent incisiveness of the satire. I like what he says and how he says it. Julio doesn’t glumly criticize airplanes as symbols of human hubris and the destruction of past pleasures. No. It’s just that, quite honestly and fairly evaluated, the benefits of the jet and the disadvantages of other forms of transportation are outweighed by the combination of the airplane’s disadvantages and walking’s benefits.
Notice the seemingly innocuous taking over of the tone and idiom of informational discourse – like a guerrilla fighter accidentally stumbling onto the controls of a major broadcast network. The children’s encyclopedia or filmstrip, the old newsreels in movie theaters: we’ve all heard this narrator announcing, with good natured enthusiasm that just barely crosses the line beyond even the pretense of journalistic or scientific objectivity, the first steps on the moon, or Lucky Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, or the lioness nursing her young. Julio dons this vocal disguise and begins to make it say something else.
But this strategy also has its limitations because in order to exploit the benevolence of this conventional tone and idiom, he can’t cynically violate the content that conventionally goes with it. That’s why Progress, capital P, gets to keep moving forward, in its familiar wide-eyed march, each step in the ladder already a superb testament to human ingenuity.
Yet each step somehow surprises me. By the end, the treasury of youth reveals a secret. If I expected the individualized jet (“velocity, stability, silence, and total privacy” the narrator might gush) to appear over the horizon, I am surprised by the apparent lack of sophistication in what does come (a pedestrian, a swimmer). But I am also surprised by the simple fact that this form of transportation, now revealed as superior, is used by millions upon millions; maybe by a majority of the humans on the planet. This puts me in the bizarre position of having to try sell my car, and even my bike, to keep up with the Joneses, who blissfully walk or swim everywhere.
And I do want that too, what the Joneses therefore have, because it is nothing other than time: the time to walk somewhere instead of rushing onto the freeway, or the time to walk aimlessly. Too often, now, I have that time only through “the magic of paid vacations.” Thus, with the last words of this little piece, with what seems to be an irrelevant toss-off line about paid vacations, Julio flings open a door exposing the regime of work.
Here he lays down some rails along which my imagination can shoot on a critical journey, making connections. I see the child with which he opens the essay blithely switching on the television. I see the child, at the same instant, with the very same gesture, unwittingly switching on a vast machine training him first in the segmentation of life into work time and leisure time and then in the occupation of his leisure time with passive consumption (a lesson well-learned, and with literally fatal consequences, by the businessman in “The Continuity of Parks” [Ù9]). I see the TV, in his hands and under the tutelage of this apparatus, become an invention that does not make, but rather kills time [Ù4, 11, 12, 26, 95]. Beyond this, I see a whole chain of inventions, all designed to save time for the fundamental purpose of increasing productivity, all insidiously sapping our desires for and abilities to create time. Not now to make time for more work, but to make time for play and for community.
So I see now that the making of time for play demands not passivity, but rather a prodigious physical, mental, and spiritual effort whence we can let go of convenience and achievement and thus disengage from the regime of forced labor and compulsory leisure.
I see why, at the Zen Temple here in Ann Arbor, we are encouraged to drink our tea with both hands – because if we drink our tea with both hands, we can’t be drinking our tea and doing something else and if we can’t be drinking our tea and doing something else at the same time, we’ll have to do them one after another and while that means – upon first impression – less time, I see that it means actually less productivity measured quantitatively, less frenetic multitasking, more deliberate consideration of priorities and thus, ultimately, as previously “essential” activities wither away beneath the clear force of this attention, it means more time and more quality.
I see “Tesoro de la juventud” become a fable, a narrative invention, a written machine designed to teach me how to make time, and to make me laugh, too. Finally, I see the “treasury of youth” turned into something like a “fountain of youth” whose elixir works not by annihilating or reversing time, but rather by entering fully into time, by helping you make yourself one with time. For perhaps if it is anything at all, “time,” as Henri Bergson thought, “is invention.”3
Is this why I write such good stuff in my head when I’ve made the time to shuffle along, exhilarated and peaceful, through pools of fiery autumn leaves on my way to the university? Is this why that same good stuff flies out of my head as if on a gust of autumn wind the second I sit down to work?
1 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Image, 1989), p. 308.
2 Julio Cortázar, “El tesoro de la juventud,” Ultimo Round, (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969), planta baja, pp. 23-29, my translation.
3 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), p. 361.